In 2025, we are excited to host you online and at La Tricoterie, Brussels on 30 September to explore Resilience and Resistance in Times of Deregulation and Authoritarianism. Register now and join us for one of the flagship digital rights gatherings in Europe.

The post #PrivacyCamp25: Registrations open and call for sessions deadline! appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

Meme culture is great! Pirates love memes. Memes help people share ideas and jokes. But some greedy corporate content creators attack those who create memes. They sue individuals who create memes with no profit intention whatsoever. We must fight back against this!

One clear case happened in Germany: welt.de/vermischtes/article256…

Fans made memes of the children´s book character Conni. The publisher sent cease and desist letters. They threatened an Instagram account. And, they succeeded. They closed the account. They limited free expression. They destroyed their own creation. While the memes would have allowed Conni to survive. Conni will die. Save Conni!

While Germany has an especially strict amount of copyright infringement, this issue is a global one and these problems are not isolated to just memes.

These cases happen in the art world. Disney has sent legal notices for fan art:
valueaddedresource.net/disney-…
vulture.com/article/disney-uni…

These cases happen in the game industry. Nintendo shuts down games derived from their content:
gamesradar.com/former-pokemon-…

They happen in the music industry. Musicians sue other musicians for remixing their tracks.
musicbusinessworldwide.com/dua…

They happen in the social media sphere. Fans of global events in South Korea were warned over martial law memes: forbes.com/sites/callumbooth/2…

Memes are great! Game revisions are great! Remixes are great! Social media protests are great! This is how society develops and creates new forms of expression. Knowledge is derivative. We learn from history and create new versions that are slightly different but better.

Let´s demand protection of memes! No material should be frozen by copyright!

pp-international.net/2025/07/p…

Our next member meeting is today, 7/13 at 8pm. The agenda page is up. We will discuss a draft 2026 campaign plan.

Contact us if you want to add anything or bring it up at the meeting.

It will be a video meeting at our community bridge page.

Previous meeting:

• agenda: masspirates.org/wiki/June_22nd…
• recording: youtu.be/DlIKd-PyIcI

masspirates.org/blog/2025/07/1…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s the 107th day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 27th day that Mario Guevara has spent behind bars for covering a protest. Read on for news on more recent affronts by the government on the free press.

LA journalists reflect on protest attacks

Journalists covering recent demonstrations in California have been assaulted, detained, shot with crowd-control munitions, and had their equipment searched — simply for doing their jobs.

Independent journalists from Los Angeles talk to FPF about the attacks from law enforcement they endured while covering recent demonstrations.

Screenshot.

Independent reporters are especially vulnerable. We hosted an online discussion with some of them — Ben Camacho, Sean Beckner-Carmitchel and Tina-Desiree Berg — to hear their firsthand accounts of their efforts to uphold the public’s right to know. We were also joined by Adam Rose, press rights chair at the Los Angeles Press Club, which, along with others, has sued law enforcement agencies for violating freedom of the press at the recent protests. Since our discussion, the judge in one of those lawsuits has ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to stop violating the First Amendment rights of journalists covering protests.

Listen to the conversation here.

New Jersey prosecutors ignore Constitution

Prosecutors are pursuing blatantly unconstitutional criminal charges against two Red Bank, New Jersey, journalists for declining to remove a police blotter entry about an arrest from a news website after the arrest was expunged, as FPF’s U.S. Press Freedom Tracker first reported.

They’re alleged to have engaged in disorderly conduct by revealing the existence of an arrest, knowing that the arrest record has been expunged or sealed, in violation of New Jersey Revised Statutes Section 2C:52-30.

We said in a press release that “prosecuting journalists for declining to censor themselves is alarming and blatantly unconstitutional … Any prosecutors who would even think to bring such charges either don’t know the first thing about the Constitution they’re sworn to uphold, or don’t care.” Read more here.

The rise and fall of FOIA Gras

Tom Hayden never intended to become a journalist. But in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hayden decided to look into how his local school district in Evanston, Illinois, was making decisions about when to send kids back to school.

That led to his Substack newsletter, FOIA Gras. As the name implies, it focused on Freedom of Information Act-based reporting. He broke important stories about local schools and more, and FOIA Gras became an invaluable resource for Evanstonians.

But earlier this year, he decided to shut it down after growing tired of the personal toll of being an unpaid citizen journalist covering politically charged news. Read more here.

Secrecy surrounds ICE’s for-profit detention network

President Donald Trump’s signature budget legislation allocates Immigration and Customs Enforcement a staggering $45 billion to expand immigrant detention efforts. Much of this money will go towards tripling ICE’s for-profit detention facility network.

Even though these private facilities hold human beings in federal custody under federal law, they are not subject to FOIA, the federal transparency law. This must change. Read more here.

Speaking of secret police…

Louisiana is the latest state to ignore the First Amendment to restrict journalists and others from recording police up close. Countless important news stories have come from footage of police abuses — which is exactly why we keep seeing laws like these.

We joined a legal brief led by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and National Press Photographers Association. If you’re able, NPPA is definitely an organization you should support. They do an incredible job protecting the rights of photojournalists and all journalists, but they’re in financial trouble and need your help. Read the brief here.

What we’re reading

SPJ urges caution on anti-doxing laws, warns of threat to press freedom (Society of Professional Journalists). Anti-doxing laws, if not drafted carefully, could become tools to punish journalism. Read the letter we signed urging the Uniform Law Commission to pause potential legislation.

‘I am being persecuted’ | Atlanta journalist held in ICE custody releases letter (WALB News). “I am being persecuted for having carried out my journalistic work ... I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,” wrote imprisoned journalist Mario Guevara.

Immigration officials used shadowy pro-Israel group to target student activists (The New York Times). Students exercising their First Amendment rights shouldn’t concern the government. And officials should base decisions on real intelligence, not “research” by amateur internet trolls.

Trump officials want to prosecute over the ICEBlock app. Lawyers say that’s unconstitutional (Wired). “ICE and the Trump administration are under the misimpression that law enforcement in the United States is entitled to operate in secret,” we told Wired.

I chaired the FCC. The ‘60 Minutes’ settlement shows Trump has weaponized the agency (The Guardian). “What was once an independent, policy-based agency is now using its leverage to further the Maga message,” writes former Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler.

Gabbard’s team has sought spy agency data to enforce Trump’s agenda (The Washington Post). This retaliation could chill FOIA releases across the government. We are filing FOIA requests to learn how Gabbard’s agency is trying to stifle lawful disclosures.

Wishing for a world where corporate motives didn’t clash with the sacred trust of journalism (Poynter). “The ethics of the professional and the business can bump into each other. When they do, it is imperative that the ethics of the profession take precedence.”

freedom.press/issues/la-journa…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Prosecutors are pursuing baseless criminal charges against two Red Bank, New Jersey, journalists for refusing to remove a police blotter entry from a news website, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s U.S. Press Freedom Tracker first reported.

The defendants are Redbankgreen publisher Kenny Katzgrau and reporter Brian Donohue. They’re alleged to have engaged in disorderly conduct by revealing the existence of an arrest, knowing that the arrest record has been expunged or sealed, in violation of New Jersey Revised Statutes Section 2C:52-30. They’re represented by Pashman Stein Walder Hayden P.C., who have moved to dismiss the ridiculous charges. (Read their motion to dismiss below.)

On Sept. 18, 2024, Redbankgreen published the August 2024 blotter provided by the Red Bank Police Department, which contained information about the arrest. The arrest was later expunged on March 27, 2025. The blotter published by the Redbankgreen includes an update that the arrest was expunged, as well as a note that arrests in general are not determinations of guilt.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Director Seth Stern said:

Prosecuting journalists for declining to censor themselves is alarming and blatantly unconstitutional, as is ordering the press to unpublish news reports. Any prosecutors who would even think to bring such charges either don’t know the first thing about the Constitution they’re sworn to uphold, or don’t care. Failure to immediately correct and apologize for this inexplicable error would put prosecutors’ competence in doubt and warrant investigation of whether they should keep their law licenses.

The Supreme Court has held over and over that journalists are entitled to publish truthful information they lawfully obtain, in cases dealing with matters as sensitive as closed juvenile court proceedings and identities of rape victims. The Supreme Court of New Jersey has also upheld the right to publish expunged information. There is no exception for expunged arrest records and any state law that says otherwise violates the First Amendment. Any first-year law student should know that.

Journalists don’t work for the government and can’t be compelled to do its bidding. In the rare instances where the government is allowed to keep records from public view, it is the government’s responsibility, not the media’s, to ensure that they aren’t disclosed.

This is the latest in a string of egregious press freedom violations by local police and prosecutors across the country. Virtually all of them have failed and left taxpayers on the hook for needless legal fees, settlement payments, or both.

Earlier this year, Clarksdale, Mississippi, officials got a judge to order a newspaper to take down an editorial critical of the mayor. After national headlines about their frivolous antics led to public ridicule, they dropped the case.

Last year, the city of Los Angeles was forced to pay a settlement to journalist Ben Camacho after it sued him for publishing public records. Authorities in LA are also facing a lawsuit over an unconstitutional investigation of a journalist who obtained police disciplinary records.

In 2023, prosecutors in Atmore, Alabama, charged a journalist and news publisher for reporting on grand jury proceedings. The case was thrown out after becoming a national embarrassment, and a lawsuit is pending.

And most famously, the same year, authorities in Marion, Kansas, raided the newsroom of the Marion County Record as part of an investigation premised on the absurd notion that reporters violated computer crime laws by accessing a public website to confirm a news tip. The ordeal has led to multiple settlements and lawsuits, and even criminal charges against the ex-police chief who orchestrated it.

This is also, unfortunately, not the first recent instance of authorities harassing journalists over lawful reporting on arrests. Last year, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu threatened civil penalties against a journalist, Jack Poulson, who reported on a sealed report of tech executive Maury Blackman’s arrest for domestic violence. A judge held that the California law that Chiu referenced to threaten Poulson was unconstitutional and, in a separate proceeding, a lawsuit brought by Blackman against Poulson was dismissed.

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

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freedom.press/issues/nj-report…

What has the EDRis network been up to over the past two weeks? Find out the latest digital rights news in our bi-weekly newsletter. In this edition: European Commission must champion the AI Act, EDRi pushes back against risky GDPR deregulation, & more!

The post EDRi-gram, 10 July 2025 appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

New research by Bits of Freedom investigated social media platforms Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok, and e-commerce platforms Shein, Zalando and Booking.com for their use of manipulative design. The worrying findings indicate that these platforms continue to nfluence the choices of users to their detriment despite being prohibited by laws.

The post New research shows online platforms use manipulative design to influence users towards harmful choices appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

After years of debate, the GDPR Procedural Regulation has been finalised. Despite some improvements, the final text may entrench old problems and create new ones, undermining people’s rights and potentially opening the door to weakening the GDPR itself.

The post A missed opportunity for enforcement: what the final GDPR Procedural Regulation could cost us appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

Every Thursday of the week, Bastian’s Night is broadcast from 21:30 CEST (new time).

Bastian’s Night is a live talk show in German with lots of music, a weekly round-up of news from around the world, and a glimpse into the host’s crazy week in the pirate movement aka Cabinet of Curiosities.

If you want to read more about @BastianBB: –> This way

piratesonair.net/bastians-nigh…

Tom Hayden never intended to become a journalist. But in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hayden decided to look into how his local school district in Evanston, Illinois, was making decisions about when to send kids back to school.

It was a contentious issue in town and deserved journalistic inquiry. But Hayden realized the decline of local media left a void that someone needed to fill. So he decided to step up and launch his Substack newsletter FOIA Gras, which as the name implies, focused on public records-based, Freedom of Information Act-related reporting.

“Ten years ago, a board meeting would have had reporters from suburban beats that are all gone now,” Hayden said. “Now, you just see the high school beat reporter.”

Hayden’s side gig as a journalist was a big success, and his focus expanded beyond pandemic issues. “Our local board initially hated me, but now they consider me like their inspector general,” Hayden said in March. “I’m able to get records that they don’t even know about. I break stories to them about lawsuits that they don’t even know about.”

But soon after we spoke, and after he completed his coverage of Evanston’s school board elections, Hayden announced that he was ending his experiment with citizen journalism. “It’s rendered a considerable toll on my mental well-being, my professional day-to-day career, my finances, and my relationships. I always told myself if the fun is gone, I can walk away, and the fun is gone,” he wrote.

‘Throwing darts’ at public records

Hayden was familiar with FOIA requests before venturing into journalism, from seeking records as part of his day job in the corrosion industry. So, when families started moving out of Evanston to nearby towns where schools had reopened, Hayden put on his citizen-journalist hat and started pulling records.

“I started kind of just throwing darts, looking mainly at lists of public records from the board meetings, which are public, and they immediately hit,” Hayden said.

Under Illinois’ public records laws, requesters are not charged fees for most records requests (aside from copying costs for large document sets). It’s a powerful law, Hayden said, as long as you are diligent and know what you are looking for.

“Our local board initially hated me, but now they consider me like their inspector general. I’m able to get records that they don’t even know about.”

Tom Hayden

Hayden said the records he requested showed that then-superintendent Devon Horton had been misappropriating funds and steering contracts to business partners, misleading Evanstonians about financing for a school in Evanston’s Fifth Ward, and more.

With longstanding disparities in achievement gaps and funding, Hayden felt that Horton had used promises of championing diversity to divide the public rather than address the issues. “Equity is about lifting oppressed communities, not using them as a shoulder to lift yourself to a better job,” he wrote.

Hayden said he intended to use the truth to “try to find a way to bridge the people in this town that have political street fights over this.” Instead of bickering, he thought, “Let’s go get the actual records.”

To do so, Hayden launched FOIA Gras. Quickly, Hayden became a go-to source for Evanstonians to find out what was happening in the board meetings and within the district, for parents and board members alike.

A fork in the road

As a citizen journalist and his own boss, Hayden was able to set his own parameters. Despite the success of the newsletter, however, Hayden announced he was closing down FOIA Gras in April, when the work outweighed the fun and backlash against his editorial choices started affecting his personal life.

“Ultimately, for me, I sort of reached the point where this project reached a fork in the road,” Hayden said, “where I have to decide, ‘Am I a professional journalist, or am I a citizen-journalist-slash-parent-slash-community-member?’”

In one particular case, in 2022, a middle schooler was caught making nooses out of jump ropes outside of a school while a protest was going on inside over some teachers being transferred. The incident blew up in Evanston, but Hayden decided not to cover it at the time to protect the children’s identities.

“The reality is that nobody knows why the student did it,” Hayden said, but the incident became part of a narrative around a school anti-racism initiative.

Hayden FOIA’d a copy of the associated police report, which he said police provided, but improperly, because it contained information on a minor.

“The incentives are broken. This is a massive national issue — there is very little money in the pursuit of truth.”

Tom Hayden

After obtaining the report, Hayden reached out to the parents involved for comment and began writing a story about the district’s response to the nooses incident. Through his reporting, Hayden became uncomfortable continuing to report on a story based on speculation and decided to stop. Unfortunately, that made some of his readers angry.

One parent “reached out to me as a source and provided me some information about his child, who was only tangentially involved, but not the kid who made the nooses,” Hayden said. But the parent then provided the story to a national outlet, The Free Press, because, said Hayden, it fit its agenda of having “anti-woke stories.” That outlet ultimately ran the story.

“Very little money in the pursuit of truth”

The Free Press reported that, according to its sources, the child who made the noose was dealing with mental health issues and didn’t know about the racial connotations of hanging nooses. It accused Superintendent Horton of turning a child’s cry for help into a self-promotion opportunity during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement. It framed Evanston — known for the country’s first municipal reparations program, among other racial justice initiatives — as an example of wokeness going too far (not long after the article, the Trump administration launched an investigation of the school district).

The drama surrounding the noose incident and Free Press article was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Hayden. People began ascribing nefarious motives to his decision not to cover the story, when in reality he just didn’t want to contribute to putting middle schoolers in the middle of a public spectacle. Hayden decided he’d close down FOIA Gras after the school board election in April. He continues to both work full-time and teach data governance at Northwestern University.

“There’s a set of ethical rules that a professional journalist has to follow, especially when it comes to editorial decisions and injecting my own opinion into stories,” Hayden said. “I just reached that fork in the road.” His preference was always to report on verifiable data — that’s why he felt so at home with FOIA. But fact-based reporting wasn’t enough for his readers, and the aforementioned “political street fights” continued despite his efforts.

Ultimately, despite the important news he broke, the experience left Hayden cynical about the future of the profession he dabbled in. “I don’t feel good about the future of journalism,” he wrote in his departing announcement. “The incentives are broken,” Hayden said. “This is a massive national issue — there is very little money in the pursuit of truth.”

This is fourth in a series of profiles of independent journalists who use public records to hold local governments accountable. The third, about Michelle Pitcher’s reporting on the Texas criminal justice system, is here. The second, about Hannah Bassett of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, is here. The first, about Lisa Pickoff-White of the California Reporting Project, is here.

freedom.press/issues/the-rise-…

52 civil society organisations, experts and academics have written to the European Commission to express their concerns about growing pressure to suspend or delay the implementation and enforcement of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Instead of unraveling the EU rulebook, which includes hard-won legal protections for people, the Commission should focus on the full implementation and proper enforcement of its rules, like the AI Act.

The post Open letter: European Commission must champion the AI Act amidst simplification pressure appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

PPI´s main delegate in at the UN Office of Geneva, Carlos Polo, attended the 113th International Labour Organization Conference. The event took place in June 2-13, 2025. The ILO predates the UN, and it has a very important place in history. It was founded when World War One came to a close with the Treaty of Versailles. It became the first specialized agency of the United Nations in 1946 with a specialization in social justice. This year´s conference focused on biological hazards in the workplace, but a wide range of employment issues were discussed.

The ILO is an organization that PPI would like to be involved with more to help strive for digital freedom in the workplace. Many freelance workers and small businesses have contacted us about problems they have with antiquated copyright legislations and big corporations that tie up workers with legal malaise that prohibits them from ever gaining an advantage. Engaging with the ILO helps us advance international policies. By neglecting the rights of workers, big corporations stifle innovation and keeps small players from ever gaining a foothold in making their own technological advancements.

We share some photos of Carlos from the event. Pirate Parties International will continue to join these events and update our community about our activities at the UN. We also currently have represenatives at the World Summit on Information Society, WSIS +20. We will be updating soon with pictures from that event as well.

If you or any other Pirates you know would like to participate in ILO or other UN events, please let us know by filling out the volunteer form: lime.ppi.rocks/index.php?r=sur…

If you would like to help PPI continue to send representatives to these meetings, please consider making a small donation to our organization or becoming a member. If you would like to be involved personally in the movement, by writing about these issues or attending events, please let us know.

Donations

pp-international.net/donations…

pp-international.net/2025/07/i…

EDRi has responded to the European Commission’s consultation on the GDPR ‘simplification’ proposal. The plan to remove documentation safeguards under Article 30(5) risks weakening security, legal certainty and rights enforcement, and opens the door to broader deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook.

The post Undermining the GDPR through ‘simplification’: EDRi pushes back against dangerous deregulation appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).